A great deal of the interaction between economics and government is counter-intuitive - protectionism to 'save' jobs and preserve living standards actually ends up costing jobs and lowering living standards, that sort of thing. The bogey of aircraft noise over western Sydney or, worse, far south-western Sydney fits that category.

Rather than reduce living standards and house prices, proximity to an airport can lift both. Maybe not living directly adjacent to the runway to the extent of having the tea cups rattled by 747 take-offs, but even then an airport can encourage a warehouse developer to pay more for the land than it's worth as marginal housing, or an intelligent government might preserve green space for agriculture or recreational use.

Stacking up the numbers

The furphy at the core of Barry O'Farrell's political desire to not alienate the voters of a single seat anywhere is that a second airport in the Sydney basin would impose aircraft noise on 1.6 million innocent civilians, stop the hens laying and generally render life west of Parramatta unsustainable.

At this point one might wonder how that very large figure is calculated, just how much noise was required to be heard over what sort of figure-eight flight path, but it's the sort of big figure people pushing a barrow like to come up with to at least scare susceptible chooks.

But let's run with that 1.6 million figure anyway and propose that, if it's correct for the relative low-density housing of Sydney's west, we could double it for the much higher density of Sydney's north, east, south and inner-west. That sounds reasonable – but it would mean 3.2 million people, highlighting the danger of getting carried away with this sort of argument. Indeed, it's tempting to triple it – and find there are more people hearing aircraft than live in Sydney at all, so let's show some restraint and pluck another figure out of the air, so to speak, and claim only two million people can at least sometimes hear planes bound for Botany Bay.

Let's pretend there's no overlap between my two million and Barry O'Farrell's 1.6 million and then suggest that the two million, on average, live in more desirable and, therefore, more expensive housing than the 1.6 million. They do so not just despite existing aircraft noise but partly because of it. There's a not-too-subtle market message in housing being much more expensive under the existing flights paths than out on the poorly-served frontiers O'Farrell has promised to keep as poorly-served frontiers.

Jobs proximity

As David Williamson suggested in Emerald City, the meaning of life is waterfront real estate, but beyond that, the best guide to desirable housing is proximity to worthwhile employment. The main reason housing is cheap on the city's fringes isn't the distance to the Opera House per se, but the general lack of employment opportunities within a reasonable distance, which in turn is where poor infrastructure kicks in.

I have sat through a most learned explanation of another city's employment, infrastructure and housing evolution that looked like a series of evolving Rorschach ink blot tests. Beyond seeing the occasional butterfly and horsey, the power of the employment driver was obvious even to me.

Airports are great employment generators, both directly and indirectly. They also demand and receive lashings of support infrastructure. The biggest problem facing Sydney's west isn't aircraft noise but the lack of just such employment generators and infrastructure. And the NSW government is incapable of doing much about it – it doesn't have the money, is scared of increasing debt to invest and, like the other state governments, has trashed its tax base and isn't game to try to repair it.

Whose money?

The neat thing about an airport is that it can largely be paid for by the private sector, albeit with wise deals needing to be done on the infrastructure side – unlike the ill-thought granting to Macquarie Bank of a monopoly to tax, let alone the private railway station fiasco. And infrastructure built around facilitating employment growth eventual pays for itself.

There are trade-offs with aircraft noise, as there are with most things in life. There might be an old-age pensioner who bought a residence under the present flight path before there was an aircraft noise factor, but it's unlikely – Mascot's age and the rate with which we turn over our houses means people living under the flight path knew or should have known what they were getting into. At a price point, the compromise is worthwhile. Inner-city and “Bennelong Funnel” housing prices indicate it's a compromise plenty find worthwhile. Similarly, no-one in the vicinity of Badgerys Creek should have been innocent of the airport possibilities as long as the Federal Government owned all that land.

Unfortunately Sydney's second airport has long passed beyond economic reason and into the realm of political dogma. It is one of the sorriest examples of politicians from both sides lacking the principle to govern for the general good instead of their own short-term political advantage.

At the federal level, Labor wants to push the new airport way out to Wilton where there are coalition members while the coalition favours the experts' preferred option of Badgerys Creek, populated for the time with Labor seats.

Conspiracy

Elsewhere on these pages, Paul Sheehan comes up with a conspiracy theory that what Labor's inner-city hacks are actually about is a fiendish plot to just replace Mascot altogether - which, just for a start, greatly overestimates the ability of said hacks to organise anything, let alone stay in power long enough to achieve it. Sheehan takes the O'Farrell's “do nothing" school a step further to paint it as a virtue, but the brave idea that the existing airport will be perfectly adequate until 2045 still begs the question of “what then?”. On current form, a hard decision to go ahead with a second airport today might mean it was ready by 2045, but only 'might'.

But a little hope was suggested by aviation veteran Ben Sandilands at the end of a nice summary of the airport follies for Crikey last week. Adding to the weight of the recent multi-agency strategic review, Sandilands first destroyed both the O'Farrell and Albanese positions:

The chairman of Sydney Airport, Max Moore-Wilton did his urbane best to insist that Sydney airport could easily take the necessary increase in growth for the next 40 years, which anyone who has been using Sydney airport regularly will know is bollocks, now.

In fact, the estimates are that there will be 1000 more flights per week from China by 2025 and there is no room for any of them even if they were Tiger Moths. There is no peak travel-hour capacity left at Sydney Airport.

Not that Albanese and the federal government aren't in trouble too. Albanese claimed work on Badgerys Creek, the favoured site for a second airport, was stopped by the Howard government in 1996. In fact, it was stopped by Laurie Brereton in the Labor government in 1995 "in order to fast-track it", and Howard refused to un-fast-track it from its location in the political outhouse belt, but did keep the site.

You see, it's not all about an inner-city elite 'dumping' a second airport on the west, it would very much be the airport the west needs in its own right, just don't expect the usual nimbys to realise it.

The encouraging bit was left to the very end of Sandilands piece:

NSW Rail is even building the connecting tracks now by stealth, since the SW Rail project ends about three kilometres from Badgerys Creek, and the biggest graded separation rail fly-over in the southern hemisphere has almost been completed at Glenfields station, meaning the Airport Line will be able to rapidly serve both locations instead of just Sydney airport with a minor extension after its true destiny is revealed.

Hope

So, blessedly, maybe there's hope for the west yet, maybe the slow wheels of the bureaucracy that endures beyond facile politicians are turning in the right direction.

But it's only a hope – the demise of quality politics is running against it. A recent kind obituary in The Economist magazine's Bagehot column for British journalist, academic and conservative politician Norman St John-Stevas could also have been a eulogy for the loss of politicians who offered leadership.

St John-Stevas seems to have been a most uncommon man for his day and much more so for this. Notes Bagehot: “Many tributes have dwelt on his personal contradictions. They describe a boundless immodesty redeemed by self-mocking wit—on being accused of name-dropping, St John-Stevas is said to have sighed: 'The queen said exactly the same to me yesterday'.”

But what would set him apart more so now is the belief that an MP should obey his judgment rather than voters or his local party, that an MP should be a representative rather than a mere delegate – an important difference.

“A lynching might await an MP who quoted St John-Stevas that a key role for Parliament is 'educating the nation' - chewing over hard questions with greater knowledge and information than the common voter, then disseminating that wisdom via the reporting of debates,” suggests Bagehot.

That runs counter to the shock-jock driven trend that demands politicians do what they are told. The same column quotes a poll that found Britons by a ratio of two-to-one wanted MPs to be delegates instead of representatives, that most would like big policy decisions determined by referendum rather than parliamentary debate.

But that way the shallow politics of immediate self-interest lie, which looks just like the Sydney second airport farce.